Mother Earth forced us to become different by making our comfortable forest and savanna in the northeastern corner of Africa sink very gradually under water. Our ancestors, like other apes, had been able to stand bent-legged for short periods. Now they had to stand most of the time to keep their heads out of water. This must have been hard to do until their skeletons changed so it was easiest to stand. Another big change was that they lost their fur which was no good for insulation when wet. It was replaced by a layer of fat just under the skin. But this bare skin needed protection from too much tropical sun. Natural selection favored those with darker skin so our earliest ancestors were almost certainly very black. When some of them went North to Europe and Asia, where there isn't as much sun, natural selection favored those with lighter skin which absorbs more sunlight to form vitamin D. That's why we have black and white people today - but black came first.

Our ancestors spread rapidly. Between 1,700,000 and 1,400,000 years ago, they had spread from Spain to China. Some had even reached South America at least 48,000 years ago. The Chinese discovery is most important because no one could survive the winters there without fire, fur clothing and shelter. This means they were pretty smart and had learned these skills. They could not have been the stupid semi-animals many older anthropologists called them.

We have only a very few tantalizing fragments of information about our very early ancestors: They marked bones for records some 300,000 years ago. About 250,000 years ago, an artist visualized a woman in a small stone and carved it until everyone could see her. About 100,000 years ago a young person was buried reverently. The body in a 50,000 year old burial in northern Iraq had been covered with flowers of six different medicinal herbs. Perhaps this person had been a healer. A 46,000 year old burial in the same cave was of a man who had been badly crippled since birth, showing that they cared for their handicapped fellows. Some 30,000 years ago, our ancestors were living in round huts of bent branches covered with thatch or skins. In the open plains of the Ukraine, they made their homes by carefully piling large mammoth bones and covering them with thatch and clay Caves were usually used as temples, judging from the paintings and the lack of debris from living activities. They were only used for living where material for huts was hard to find.

They had plenty to eat much of the time. In similar modern tribes, three to five hours work a day provides an ample, varied diet. (Consider this next time you come home late Friday with a briefcase full of work to be done by Monday.) For hunting they probably used slings which could kill a small animal at more than 100 yards. (In Mexico, the Spanish learned that a slingstone could break an iron sword at 75 yards.) For bigger game, they had the spearthrower, called an atlatl in America, with which they could throw a dart through a mammoth's skin at the same distance. (Other Spanish soldiers found that such a dart could go through two layers of chain mail.) Traces of a net into which small game could be driven have been found in a 29,000-year-old site at Dolni Vestonice. They collected plants and stored some in pits for later use. They wove fabrics, some as fine as a linen table cloth, so they had woven clothing - not just skins. Women probably had children only when they wanted them because their healers knew many medicinal herbs, including some which control fertility. But life was not always easy. Food became scarce in late winter and early spring. The epitome of beauty was not today's slender, lithe figure, but plenty of fat to support pregnancy and nursing through the winter and into late spring. This gave the baby more time to grow before the next winter.

And a long "winter" was coming against which no amount of fat could prevail. When the last Ice Age began about 25,000 years ago, mile-high sheets of ice slowly crept across much of Europe, Asia and North America. People and animals in Europe moved south and west to survive. About 15,000 years ago when this Ice Age ended, the climate became wetter and warmer than it is today. Plants, animals and people spread out again and multiplied for thousands of years in what we call the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age. But mammoths, giant deer, giant horse and some other large animals had vanished. Possibly our ancestors, armed with their powerful darts and spearthrowers had found them good eating during the cold times.

About 10,000 years ago in parts of the Middle East and southeast Europe the population had grown so much that hunting and gathering no longer produced enough food. What to do? Our ancestors began to raise animals and cultivate wheat and barley. To tend their crops and herds, they had to settle in permanent villages . Farming and stock raising were more work than hunting and gathering, but they probably ate more regularly, especially in winter. We call this the Neolithic or New Stone Age.

These permanent towns were usually near water on relatively flat land for fields and pastures. They built substantial houses with log posts and walls of woven small branches covered with clay. In some Middle East towns the houses were built against each other without ground floor doors and with strong flat roofs, like our southwestern pueblos, . Pottery models of temple buildings and other remains show that they could build two or three stories high. Towns of 500 houses and 4,000 people were being built 6,000 years ago.

Flint was used for some tools but for sharp cutting tools they preferred obsidian, a volcanic glass. Obsidian from Anatolia, the eastern part of Turkey, has been found as far west as Spain. It was probably imported in seagoing ships built with those stone tools. The wreck of one Neolithic ship has been found, indicating that they were real seagoing sailors.

In their temples they made carefully-finished glazed pottery, baked bread and wove cloth. The secrets of transforming clay, grain and wool into pottery, bread and cloth may have been religious rituals practiced only by the priestesses.

Over 200 different signs on the pottery indicate that writing was used in southern Europe about 8000 years ago, but most writing may have been done on bark or skins which have vanished. We have many more records, some about 6,000 years old from the Middle East where bark and skins were scarce and marks were made on clay tablets which were sun dried.

They seem to have been non-belligerent because no burials included weapons for fighting. They painted pictures of animal hunting, but none of person-to-person combat. The most elaborate graves were of children, rather than adult community leaders.

About 8000 years ago, people living near the great grasslands of southern Europe and Asia, succeeded in taming horses. They found that a man riding a horse could go about five times as far as he could on foot; hunt much more effectively; and bring heavier game home. A regular supply of high-calorie horsemeat was so desirable that these tribes began to follow the great herds. The next discovery was that men could take over the leadership of a herd of horses by taming their natural leader. This nomadic culture spread rapidly over 2800 miles from the Carpathian Mountains east of the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains of Eastern Mongolia. Men now became the leaders because their greater strength was needed to control horses. Women were relegated to a secondary status as bearers of children, cooks, seamstresses and bed companions.

The critical difference in this pastoral way of life, compared to settled agriculture was in the portability of wealth. You could get rich quickly by stealing the herd from another tribe, killing the herders if necessary. This naturally led to retaliation. Soon, everyone was fighting to protect what he owned or get more from someone else.

They developed the sword for better fighting on horseback. It was effective against other men on horse or on foot but no use for hunting because slashing wounds don't stop game animals. These long chipped flints, or bones with sharp flint chips set into a groove were important status symbols. They are found even in the graves of boys too young to have been able to use them, and important leaders, were buried with several swords.

Successful leaders were rewarded by worldly goods and by burial in elaborate timber chambers under low mounds. The male skeleton is always surrounded by skeletons of women and children, obviously sacrificed to accompany him. Animals were also sacrificed. Elaborate grave goods and foods indicate belief in an afterlife. (These mounds are called "kurgans" in Russian, a name often used for these people and their culture.)

Beginning about 4500 years ago, some Kurgan tribes invaded the Middle East and the southern part of Europe. They probably encountered little resistance because the idea of man fighting man seems to have been unknown among the invaded peoples. Some tribes destroyed all traces of the older people and their culture, like the events described in the Old Testament.

Other leaders married the traditional queen-priestesses. They then took over political rule. Finally their priests perverted the original Goddess-centered religion by claiming She was merely the daughter or consort of the invaders' belligerent and jealous God. After a few generations, they claimed She was an evil being whom their masculine god had destroyed. We know this because the new priests recorded their legends on clay tablets.

In Old Europe, no written records have survived. But we can deduce much: Beginning about 5,500 years ago, small fortified groups of buildings were built on high, easily-defended places. These were not efficient for living, but this didn't bother the invaders who lived there. They just told the natives to carry water, fuel and food up to the fort - or else. Pottery changed from highly-developed types showing much skill to the cruder type typical of the Kurgans. The leaders were buried as on the steppes, in tombs under mounds accompanied by sacrificed women and children. Other burials now included men and women who had been violently killed, sometimes in groups.

Successive waves of these bellicose horse thieves spread through Europe, the Middle East, India and the Far East systematically destroying all they could of older customs, traditions and religion, and imposed their own which included leadership by one man, an angry, jealous god whose demands coincided with the wishes of the leader, subordination of women, and confrontation and violence as the solution for differences.

Since then, these customs and values have become so ingrained that we mistakenly accept them as inherent to our human nature. But they are merely the values of nomadic horseherders who fought each other to get rich. Several great teachers have been able to improve our values somewhat, at least in theory. Buddha taught right personal actions. Jesus taught of caring for your neighbor. Mohammed established some basic women's rights. Unfortunately, our now ingrained tendencies to confrontation and violence have, all too often, submerged their teachings.

The great legacy of Marija Gimbutas and other modern archaeologists is that we now know that the peaceful ways of compromise and cooperation which were practiced for at least 28,000 years led to an efficient, highly-developed civilization in which men and women met as equal partners. This is about than four times as long as the Kurgan tradition of violence, and eight times as long as the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Over the past few centuries, many governments have begun to work by cooperation and compromise, and some real progress has been made. We can go forward with the assurance that we are working in the oldest and best way.

But a most vital factor is missing; one not found in flint tools or pottery fragments: LOVE.

May you live as long as you like
And love as long as you live.

Further Reading

Gimbutas, Marija, The Civilization of the Goddess, (out of print) Harper Collins, New York

Gimbutas, Marija, The Living Goddesses, Miriam Robbins Dexter, editor University of California Press, Berkeley CA

Morgan, Elaine, The Scars of Evolution, Oxford University Press, New York

Riddle, John M., Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Rudgley, Richard, Secrets of the Stone Age, Century (Random House